The union of England and Scotland

This oil sketch depicting the union of England and Scotland was a preparatory modello for one of the nine ceiling canvases in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, Rubens's most important commission in England and one of the defining decorative achievements of the seventeenth century. The ceiling, completed and installed in 1636, glorified the reign of James I through an elaborate allegorical program developed in collaboration with court theologians and men of letters. The union of the two kingdoms under James's accession in 1603 was the inaugural political achievement of the reign, and Rubens rendered it as a celestial event witnessed and blessed by divine wisdom. The commission was negotiated during Rubens's diplomatic mission to London in 1629–30, when Charles I knighted him, and represents the culmination of his dual career as painter and statesman. The sketch demonstrates Rubens's compositional method: establishing the movement of figures, the flow of drapery, and the interplay of light and shadow before committing to the final large-scale canvas. Inigo Jones had designed the Banqueting House itself — the first major building in England in the Italian Baroque manner — making the ceiling a collaboration between England's leading architect and Europe's greatest painter.

The loose, spirited handling characteristic of Rubens's oil sketches preserves the spontaneity of his compositional thinking. Warm golden tonality and swirling figural arrangement anticipate the ceiling's effect of heavenly ascension when viewed from below.